 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Many of you have been asking me recently about how to export projects from Cakewalk for use in another door. Now this is something I've done quite a lot over the last few years and I've developed my own routine which is not that pretty but is pretty effective in terms of maintaining complete control over the project. Now this is not really for you if you simply want to export stems or multi-tracks to send to someone else for remixing your project. Although I will be covering that methodology in this video. Also you don't really need to use this method just for using the up and coming versions of Cakewalk, Cakewalk Sona especially because that will be able to read the current file formats. Now before we dive in I'd like to thank the sponsor for this video DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music. Now before we dive in I just want to take a quick look at a method you may have considered which I have found to be not that useful. Now if you look in the export menu of Cakewalk you'll see a file format called OMF which you may have considered because it is kind of designed to transfer project data from one door to another. Now it's reasonably useful in the sense that it does maintain what I'll call clip integrity. So if you've got a you know a clip which appears you know two minutes into your song lasts for 30 seconds it'll appear in the same way when we import this into another door if we use OMF. But it's severely limited in so many other ways that I don't use it to be honest with you. First of all it doesn't transfer MIDI data, it doesn't transfer tempo changes, it doesn't have things like markers etc included and we're going to be covering how to do that in today's video with the methodology I'm showing. It also relies upon the other door having the ability to actually import OMF files which not all of them do anyway so that's why I'm not using OMF files in today's video but do feel free to experiment with them if you wish. Preparation is key and if you follow these next few tips it's going to make life a whole lot easier for you later on in this process. Before we do anything though I want you to make sure that you save your project to a completely new file name. We're going to be messing with the project a little bit as we extract the things we need and I don't want you to mess up the format of your current project so please do make sure you do that. The next thing I want you to make sure you do is have good meaningful names for all of your tracks. You can see down here with mine that we can pretty easily identify which track is which okay. Now this is much more than just a nice city. When we actually import this project into another door later on you're going to be able to see these names of the tracks clearly it's going to help you to identify which track is which. The other thing you may like to do is if you're using markers is make sure that they're sort of clear and have meaningful marker names because we will be importing markers into the other doors as well and then finally this is a bit outside of what we actually do in Cakewalk but I do make sure that I've got a few important screenshots okay of my current Cakewalk project. I'm primarily focused on the console view so I'll go down to my console view I'm going to double click on the tab here just to make it full screen and then I would take screenshots and make sure that I scroll across and capture all of the tracks first of all and then if I've got lots of buses which I do here I'll make sure I can see all of those and get screenshots of those as well. What I'm trying to capture is things like my fader values pan values I'm trying to capture which plugins I've used and some of the routing as well. So we can't really import or export and import those things into another door so a screenshot is a wonderful record of what we had happening in Cakewalk. Now even if your project doesn't include any MIDI data as such it's still useful to do a MIDI export because we are going to be able to export tempo changes and markers and things like that so that can give you a nice structure to your new project. So we're going to start off by making sure that we've selected all tracks before we export so I like to make sure I click on something up in the track view up here a track or what have you then I press control A to make sure that all tracks are selected and this is going to include some which are not MIDI data it could be you know sort of audio data etc that's fine the export process is just going to ignore those particular tracks then I go up to file and then go down to export and then click on standard MIDI file okay now that opens up this dialogue I'm going to select a folder I've created a folder especially for exporting all of the things I'm going to export in this process so you can see that here it's called export so I'm going in there and I want to make sure that my file type or save as type down here is MIDI format 1 now there is also MIDI format 0 as an option if you really want to just make sure you've got both versions just in case you could save with that version as well format 0 but it doesn't really include everything that we need so I go for MIDI format 1 okay and I'll just click on save and that's done now if we hop over to studio 1 as an example at the moment I'll go over there and import that file into studio 1 like so I'll just zoom so that I can see everything then we can see our MIDI data is there but if we go up to the top here in studio 1 I'm just going to show markers and show tempo then you can see the markers are there from cakewalk the tempo is set at the beginning and there's these tempo changes at the end which are also included so it's a pretty useful process to do at this stage so I like to export the audio as raw as possible because I'm going to apply the mix and the effects and the panning etc to that audio in the new door I don't want that to be done here and I don't want to export the results of that you have to be careful when you do export individual tracks if you're not careful they can be affected by fader positions by panning by effects etc I don't want that so I want to reset a few things here okay so I'm going to start off I like to see my console view nice and clearly so I'm just going to double click on the console tab at the bottom just to bring up to a kind of a full screen view and then I'm going to be using something called the mix recall feature or module so if you can't see that right click on the top bar up here go to modules and then go to mix recall okay that brings up that module then if we go to the drop down menu here for it I like to just go down to mix recall settings and I just want to make sure that both controls and automation are checked okay so I want to recall those things I'll click on okay then I'll go back up to the mix recall menu and then go to reset mix okay I'll click on that and it's going to warn me that this isn't this is an undoable action which is why I asked you to make sure you saved your file to a new file earlier because this is destructive okay so I'm going to go ahead and do it click on yes and that has reset all of the faders to zero okay and also it's reset all the panning controls okay this is just one way you can do this I know you can use the select all methods and using control but I just prefer this just make sure I capture everything here unfortunately though it doesn't include the gain settings and I do want to make sure that my gain control is reset okay now again selecting all for this and using control and adjusting gain you can't reset them all to zero with that method that I know many of us use so unfortunately we do have to go through and just double click on each gain control as I'm doing here if it's not already on zero that is and that just resets the gain control it's a bit tedious but for most things it's only going to take a minute at the most so you're just going to make sure you do that so that when we export our audio later we're getting it as raw as we possibly can unfortunately this is a little bit of a complex process unlike using our sponsor DistroKid if you release your music through them you just have to upload the audio and your artwork fill in a simple form and DistroKid does all the rest including getting out to Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play etc etc all of the popular platforms it's not a headache it's a breeze and it gets the job done very quickly indeed now in terms of getting this job done we now need to actually export our audio so before I actually export I like to manually select where I think the end of the song is okay if you don't manually do this cakewalk can give you some unexpected results at times so that's why I like to do this and I simply do that by going to a point here for example where I know the song has ended and then on just one of the tracks I just drag from that point all the way over to the left right to the beginning of the project there and then that sets that area you can see that's been set at the top there the next thing I like to do is press ctrl a on the keyboard to make sure that all of the tracks are selected then I go up to the top and click on the export button and then go down to advanced and click there and that opens up this dialogue now we can actually start off by using a preset here so I'm going to go to the preset section at the top click on that and click on tracks okay so that's what we're going to be exporting all of the tracks here so that gives us a good start in that process now there's a few things I want to adjust however so I'll start off with the file name and location I don't like to have all this extra garb in there because that will all be used as the track name in the new drawer and I just want to keep it down to the track name so you can just go ahead and grab all of that and delete it and then I would go to this symbol over here which is the tag symbol click on that and then with this pop up I select track okay then we can close that so the track name is now going to be used as the file name and then when we drag that into a new door that file name will be used as the track names okay so it's an easy way of transferring your track names over the next thing I do is select my export location so I think that's set fine but if you need to set that then just click on this here and you can do that and then I want to set up my format so first of all wave is fine for channel format I like to select follow source that means my mono tracks will still remain mono my stereo will still remain stereo okay next for sample rate I like to set that to my current project sample rate which is 48 so I'll change that to 48 thousand and then the bit depth again I like to set that same as my project which is currently 24 so I don't need to change that and that also means I don't really need to use dithering so I'll just select none for dithering because I'm not making any changes to bit depth and then finally we can relieve everything else the same there because we selected all of our tracks before we open up this dialogue then all of the tracks are selected here so we don't need to select them the next thing I want to adjust is this mix and render section so essentially for me I like to have everything switched off like so but you can leave the 64 bit engine switched on and then finally we want to set the area the timing and that's why I dragged that area out early on to manually set it so if you're going to do that just make sure you have time selection set here and the start and the end will be according to your selection which you're made earlier then you can just go ahead and click on export and it's going to give you confirmation here in terms of which file names it's actually going to create so that's pretty useful at this point in case you've got anything wrong there and you can go ahead and click on okay and at the top you will see the progress happening there and it'll probably take quite a while for a lot of big projects so just wait till that's finished before you do anything else so the next thing I would do is save all of my settings for my plugins I'm afraid it's a little bit manual perhaps a little bit tedious but it's the only way I know how to do this there's one thing worth pointing out there is a different file format between vst2 and vst3 versions of plugins so you need to make sure that you make note of which version you're using for the presets to be able to work so for example in this track over here which is a male vocal track um let's have a look at this fab filter eq here okay this isn't the actual eq setting by the way it's just an example um but anyway this is a vst2 plugin we can see that at the top here yeah and this is where we click to save our preset so just click there and then click on save preset give it file name and then you can use this in your new door when you load in this plugin but as I say if we look at the vst3 version yeah again go to the same place it says vst3 this time yeah save preset just the same as before but it's actually a different file format okay and the two vst versions can't share those files so as I say it's important that you make note of which version you're using in your project currently you just have to manually go through all of your plugins and save their settings in that way unless of course you're already using one of the plugins presets in which case you probably don't need to do this so that's pretty much here in terms of what you can do from cake walk itself the next phase is getting it into the new door and unfortunately of course I can't show you that because it's different with each door but I will give you a couple of tips first of all I would usually start off by using the midi files that we created and try and open them as a midi file rather than using an import in most cases that will make sure that you do get the tempo and marker information that gives you a basic structure to your new project in your new door then I would drag in your audio that should be a fairly simple process and if you've used the methods I've used here the track names and things should already be set up in most cases with most doors that I've tried this with the next thing after that would be recreating your mix that's what the screenshots were for to get a record of fader positions and panning and all of that kind of thing and then finally I would insert the plugins and then you know set them all up using the presets that we just saved a moment ago it is not the prettiest process in the world as you get a bit more fluent with it I usually find it takes maybe about two to three hours most of the time to have it set up in the new door in a sort of a meaningful way but it's the best method I think that we've got at the moment thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you in the next video